Atrioc Streams For The First Time Since His Scandal, And He's Been Busy
Twitch streamer Brandon "Atrioc" Ewing has just returned to his channel for the first time after taking a six-week-long hiatus. This is following the scandal that resulted from him accidentally pulling up an internet tab from a deepfake website featuring AI-generated pornography while he was live on Twitch. This site prominently featured several images bearing the likeness of other famous streamers.
Unsurprisingly, there was a major backlash to this revelation, both from Atrioc's colleagues and from the community at large. Fellow Twitch Streamer and creator of the Stream Awards, QTCinderella, sought legal action to get the website taken down. Meanwhile, Atrioc posted an apology where he attempted to take responsibility for his actions, stating that, "QT described [the use of deepfake pornography] to me as a 'wildfire' and I believe that is correct. My goal now is concrete action to fight that wildfire and do everything I can do to combat the damage."
Atrioc went on to lay out his plan to cover the legal costs of the lawsuit and individual takedowns of victims against the site, as well as separately seeking to get similar content removed from platforms like Reddit. He said that he would be "stepping away from content creation and OFFBRAND" while he did this in order to give the issue his "full focus." His most recent stream provided his fans with an update on what he's been doing over the last six weeks.
Atrioc lays out what he's been doing
The stream in question, unfortunately, had some technical issues which caused his video feed to lag and cut out several times throughout, but Atrioc ultimately decided to just muddle through and say what he needed to say.
Atrioc began by apologizing for the way his last live apology turned out but quickly dove into the steps he has taken in the time since the scandal began. He claimed to have "wired Morris and Rothman about $60 thousand dollars to cover any woman on Twitch who wanted to use their [legal] services for DMCA takedowns and representation management" one "week after the event." He said that he was sought out by a "leading researcher in the fight against deepfakes" named Genevieve Oh, who believed that his apology was genuine and helped to educate him on the greater problem.
He then used this information to apply a marketing technique he called "[finding] bright spots" to uncover who had been most successful in fighting deepfakes, learning that it was actually Only Fans creators. He also met with Dan Purcell, the CEO and founder of a company called Ceartas DMCA, which has been using "bots and AI" to uncover unauthorized uses of a person's likeness. He learned that this organization has been the most successful in helping Only Fans creators keep their work safe and decided that working with them might be the most effective way to combat the problem.
Atrioc is trying to help streamers find better ways to fight deepfakes
Atrioc then explained that the usual method of combating deepfakes is to pay a lawyer to manually search for links to illegally used images, and then file individual DMCA takedown requests. He said that he worked with fellow streamer Maya Higa and they used some of the money from the account he set up with Morris and Rothman and that they were only able to take down 51 URLs through this typical legal strategy. In March, he and Maya ran a test with Ceartas where he said that they were able to delist 512 URLs and report 1,400 URLs in just "12 hours" for an estimated ten percent of the cost.
He then said that he contacted QTCinderella and ran the test with her, claiming that the results were "even better" and that upon seeing it firsthand, QTCinderella helped Atrioc reach out to several other streamers including Pokimane who also used the service. Atrioc stated, "There's no way to get rid of this stuff permanently ... But if you can get it delisted from Google and increase the friction of finding it then that helps you with brands. That helps you with your family googling your name. It's just better for reputation management. It's better for your life."
He then claimed to have budgeted an additional $40 thousand for Ceartas on top of the $60K he'd already sent to Morris and Rothman. Atrioc said that he had a lot more plans in the works, but that's as much as he can talk about right now.